Monthly Archives: November 2012

Metric – Not So Unplugged

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I went my all time favorite band-Metric’s concert about a week ago. I got there early enough to be right in front of the stage. Needless to say, they blew my freaking mind.

So close I can taste ya

Musicians, not unlike politicians these days, can’t turn their backs on social media if they want to survive. Rather than begrudgingly buy into the latest “gimmick” that is the social media, Metric is one of the musicians that embraces social media as a tool to better communicate to their fans in order to close the gap. They provide genuine value for their fans to subscribe to them and visit their website, through exclusive track release, early ticket sales, and merchandise.

For their most recent tour, Synthetica, they have been utilizing social media even more to increase engagement. Many artists simply post the link to their ticket vendors continuously hoping to encourage sales from their fans. Metric, on the other hand, has been placing their concert tickets at hidden locations of the city they are touring, and they post them on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, few of their fans can have a chance to come watch them for free. These few tickets may cost them couple hundred dollars (maybe none if the concert is not sold out), but the emotional engagement and the buzz the campaign is generating probably far outweigh the cost.

Lucky bastards!

Nice to see my favorite band excel in a craft that I care about!

Hopscotch Listens

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Last Saturday, I went to Hopscotch, the largest premium Scotch, Whisky, and Beer festival. The tickets sold out weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to get an invite from a friend who had a spare ticket. I had no idea how popular this event is until I got to PNE Forum where it was taking place-line around the block. After you give them a $45 ticket at the door, you are handed a Hopscotch shot glass and five tokens upon entering.

Basically, you’re on the floor packed full of alcohol “enthusiasts” and vendors from around the world, and you walk up to stations you’d like and give them however much token they ask for a tasting portion of what they are serving. The token price can range from 1~3 tokens, and they are more than happy to explain the history, company, and even the unique manufacturing process of the booze you’re gulping down.

My five tokens were gone after 10 minutes, so I just went ahead and exchanged more tokens in bulk to carry around with me all night. I felt like I was a kid again, in a very adult arcade. As I was thinking this, I made a tweet saying, “Is this paradise?” with a picture attached. Few minutes later, I got an alert saying Hopscotch replied to my tweet, and it was up on the giant screen at the venue as well.
Reply from Hopscotch

Being a dork that I am, I thought of Social Media Monitoring & Engagement we learned in class. Not only they monitored Twitter for their specialized hashtags for the event, they took what is purely a digital interaction and put it up on a physical screen for everyone to see, encouraging the rest of the consumers to follow suit. Of course this is common practice, but it was still nice to get an unexpected response from an event, and I must say, I did feel an immediate attachment to the company.
The giant screen where the Twitter feed was broadcasted
Sir. Movember?

Grandma Gangnam Style

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Today, I thought I’d share a light-hearted personal story.

So, I have a grandmother who is 79 years old. She lived very close to our family growing up, so naturally, our family has a very close relationship with her. Ever since I came to Canada she misses me tremendously and always lets me know of it as well. Although she is almost 80, she is still very mentally agile, and when the iPad 2 was about to come out, I demanded my dad to buy her one. All I expected her to be able to do with her iPad 2 was for her to make Facetime calls to see my face every now and then. Ever since then, she has been using it to listen to radios through Internet, read the news, browse the web, play Tetris & Angry Bird, send me messages with picture attached, oh and of course, lets not forget Facetime. Her latest pastime is searching for YouTube videos and Podcasts – Can you believe she brought up Psy’s Gangnam Style before I even thought of mentioning him because she watched his video on her own?

Betty, you got competition.

Yes, I love technology and I am a rational consumer who is aware that Apple is not the only one innovating these days. But there is something to be said about creating a software that achieves such intuitive integration with its hardware that an 79 year-old lady, who can’t operate a computer to save her life, can learn to communicate through it and consume digital contents on it. On paper, Apple may not wow anyone, but in experience, it still wows me whenever I get a Skype call from my grandma.

By the way, her new iPad mini just arrived last week. There is something very strange about our family picture if my sister is getting my grandma’s iPad 2 as a hand-me-down, as she gets the spanking new iPad mini. Strange indeed.

Indochino – Marketing in Style

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Indochino's Campaign for Traveling Tailor NY

We had many speakers come to our eMarketing class and share valuable insights recently. One of the recent visits was from Indochino. Lenny Goh, Social Media Manager, and Christopher Baird, Marketing Coordinator came back from launching a pop-up store event in New York not long ago. There were some hardships related to the catastrophic hurricane Sandy, but the bulk of their event took place right before the hurricane hit the city. In order to generate buzz and awareness for the brand and more specifically, the pop-up store event, Chris had to put in around 100 hours contacting appropriate media sources such as fashion bloggers, community portals, and independent writers. They were able to make much more efficient use of their marketing expense by targeting those viewership, since the majority of the traffic those websites attract are already interested in fashion and what goes on in the city.

After sharing their stories about the event, they went on to tell us about their digital marketing campaign in general. They showed us their Google Analytics and Facebook campaigns. Since their audience is moderately well defined by age & gender, Facebook was a very cost effective method for them to reach their potential customers. What took me by surprise was how systematic and elaborate their digital campaigns were set up. Each ad groups and campaign components were thought out previously, and it allowed them to do preliminary testing before deciding to allocate a larger budget on the ones that yielded better results. I think this is what fascinates me most about digital marketing-the fact that you can measure the reach of a campaign, apply a conversion value, and gauge the effectiveness in relatively concrete metrics. But the presentation was certainly an eye-opener showing us the strategic effort and diligence required to apply the principles in such scale.

O.B. Talks to You. Yes, You.

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I know. I’m talking about tampon. I didn’t necessarily choose the product before coming across the news myself; so just know that I have no personal interest in this particular product category.

I read an article about the upcoming personalized digital campaign by O.B., a tampon brand owned by Johnson & Johnson. I’m sure a lot of you saw their highly personalized campaign that went viral at the end of last year. For those who somehow missed it like I did, the story is that O.B. had a distribution issue that caused shortages in many areas, and this even lead to some of the consumers turning to eBay in order to buy the product at higher prices from other sources. After the debacle, O.B. launched an Internet campaign where women can type in their names, and shortly after, a 2~3 minute video clip of a man singing an apology song to them was generated. The kicker is, your name is actually in the video, written at the top of the music score sheet, written in rose petals, written across the sky, and even sung out loud by the actor. This is an example video for someone who typed in Sara as her name.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6G3xq_OoY]

I figured they used a pretty sophisticated video tool that can generate those footages automatically. But when the actor actually sang the person’s name, I wondered if they pre-recorded different names prior to the campaign. Turns out, there is a sound production company, called Keen Music, that has the ability to automatically generate a natural voice on demand as well. This campaign was shared by many and shortly took off and recognized as one of the most successful personalization in marketing.

O.B. has ended the Apology campaign, but they are returning with an Endless Celebration campaign late this November, (….for the launch of O.B. Ultra absorbency tampons…. Sigh) where people can experience at least the same level, if not more, of customization within the ad. I must say, I’m almost tempted to type my name in just to have a song personally dedicated to me.